Twitter Responds To Trump Account Deactivation With New Security ‘Safeguards’

Twitter has announced changes to their security system after a rogue employee deactivated President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Thursday,

Trump’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, was temporarily disabled Thursday by an employee on their last day of work at the company.

Speculation immediately began to stir among Trump supporters and haters alike, many of whom assumed Twitter had chosen to censor the president.

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However, much of the speculation came to a halt when the account was restored after just 11 minutes and Twitter said they had nothing to do with the account being deactivated.

In an effort to prevent similar incidents in the future, Twitter announced Friday they are implementing new security measures.

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“Update: We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We won’t be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it,” the social media platform wrote on its own Twitter account.

Update: We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We won’t be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it. https://t.co/8EfEzHvB7p

The company has not provided any specific details as to what measures will be implemented and how they might impact normal users of the platform.

Moreover, Twitter has not provided specific reasons explaining how Trump’s account was deactivated in the first place, though The New York Times reported Friday that it was a contractor, not an actual employee, who had disabled Trump’s account.

Questions are now being raised regarding how one person could have the power to deactivate an account so easily.

“This is a case of human negligence and lack of process in place,” Subramanian Udaiyappan, a Bangalore-based cybersecurity specialist at Cisco, told CNN. “Twitter needs to ensure that only the right people have access to such actions and these have to go through process permissions, approvals and logging before any action is taken by an employee.”

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The incident also “raises bigger questions on privacy as to what level of information access does a normal Twitter employee get,” Udaiyappan said.

It’s not the first time the account of a well-known Twitter user has been deactivated. The company came under fire last month for suspending the account of actress Rose McGowan after she used the platform to talk about the allegations of sexual harassment against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. McGowan was one of the first women to publicly accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct.